Many city people have no real clue about what roads mean to our friends who live in rural areas.

City folks get bent out of shape when they have to take a one-block detour to get around a water main repair.

On Thursday, the Daily Herald’s Tyler Clarke attended a community meeting at the Lily Plain Co-operative Hall to discuss ongoing concerns with a 13.8-kilometre detour on bad roads that they have to take because Highway 302 is washed out in one spot.

The meeting, partially organized due to urging by the Daily Herald, allowed Les Arcand and area residents to hear from MLAs and local councillors on what they consider to be an ill-conceived plan to tackle the initial washout.

The detour has created a situation in which vehicles are driving a few kilometres an hour along terrible roads that are pounding their vehicles into expensive repairs.

It’s unfair to say that the province has ignored the problem. It has been an unusually wet spring and summer so it hasn’t been an easy construction season.

Instead, local residents are questioning how they are approaching the job.

It may be worth the provincial Highways department reaching out to Arcand and some of their harsher critics in the area.

This is a project that needs to get moving.

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An old physics law states that to every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

And so it goes with the province’s announcement on Friday that the most people in Saskatchewan history have a job. In June of 2014, there were 576,900 employed in the province, an all-time record.

Obviously that’s a wonderful achievement and shows how well the province is doing. You may not be quite as excited if you’re the Human Resources director trying to fill a job.

The bustling province had a total of 14,477 jobs listed on Friday afternoon. Of those, 773 jobs were listed on Friday.

It’s incredible that even with record employment, there are more than 14,000 jobs that remain unfilled. If this keeps up, more of those jobs are undoubtedly going to be frustrated HR professionals.

• • •

Newton’s Third Law of motion may also apply to the farming community.

After a record-setting year in 2013 that brought in the province’s largest crop ever, water is sending the crop spiralling in the other direction this year.

A soggy May, June and July has stunted crop development. Elsewhere, thousands of acres of seeded land lay underwater.

All that producers can hope for is a sustained period of dry heat that will allow crops to catch up to where they would normally be.

Even a perfect couple of months won’t let farmers come close to last year’s good tidings.